Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
In further research last night I (think I) came to the conclusion that the pages that we lost were over optimizised. But in what way and where are the questions. I could only compare who is listed, and who is not.
On one of my main search terms, where last week I was numbers 2 & 3, I am now # 59. (other sections are worse, but sticking to this problem for my research)The result should be one of my deeper pages, to the actual related page of the site. But what appears here is my main index page. The page that should be here I have not found yet.
So if i am thinking i am over optimized, i want to see what others on the google results page are having success with. Guess what? They are way over optimized. But this is the difference that I can see so far. In the unlinked content on the page, they repeat the search term over and over - key phrase density probably twice as much as i have, maybe more.
But I think the difference is that where I repeat the term, it is anchor text internal links. I think I repeat the phrase in the anchor text equal to or more than I do in the content on the page itself. It does not appear spammy, it is basically the navigation links that I speak of.
So, is it possible that google is looking at the anchor text links and weighing those phrases more than what is in the content itself and considering repeating phrases within the link as spam? Could it be the anchor text density verses the density of the content itself?
Am I making any sense to anyone?
[edited by: tedster at 9:20 pm (utc) on Feb. 27, 2008]
I've had the same feeling. I also have lots of anchor text with my keywords as part of my navigation on all pages.
I've started with a subdomain pulling a majority of the anchor text off and then I guess it's wait and see.
Are you saying that if I have a navigation bar that lists all of the pages (lets say same level pages for a particular area) - of course they appear on all pages -- but if it is the search term, then it is what may be causing the overoptimization.
For example, I have a celebrity site, so for actresses, I have them all in the same subject, with the nav bar showing all the other actresses (which was done for ease of use of visitors, not for SEO). Since the name of the actress is in most cases the search term, this may be what Google thinks is over optimization?
For the search phrase: "keyword1 keyword2 keyword3" (without the quotes, of course) I had one page ranked #3.
The page filename is "keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.php".
It's title is: "Company: keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 UK".
It's description is: "keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 by Company: blah blah..."
OK. Now this page is ranked #19.
So i decided to perform a search for "keyword1 keyword2 keyword3" (without the quotes, of course) and analyzed the top 10 results:
#1) Title: "Keyword2 keyword3 tips". No keyword in the URL. The 3 keywords are in the description but not in a sucession, but scattered across the description.
#2) Title: "Keyword2 keyword 3 by Company Keyword2 Services #*$!#*$! #*$!XX keyword2 keyword3". The URL has only the keyword2 in it. Again, the 3 keywords are in the description but not in a sucession, but scattered across the description.
#3) Title: aaaaaa and keyword2 keyword1 (aaaa bbbbb) Information. The URL has only the keyword1 in it. Again, the 3 keywords are in the description but not in a sucession, but scattered across the description.
...
Only the 6th result has the exact string in its title: "keyword1 keyword2 keyword3", with the keyword1 repeated 4 times. The Description is full of repetitions: keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 aaaaa bbbbb keyword1 ccccc keyword1 ddddd eeeeee keyword1 fffff keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 keyword1 ggggggg keyword1".
#7 to #10: No exact match with keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 in titles. No exact match in description.
Results 1-3 seem not to have any SEO at all. In fact, they're old html pages with zero design / optimization effort on them. One of them is made with Front Page in 2001.
1) Maybe G is filtering exact matches?
2) Maybe G is filtering clearly -yet honestly- SEOed pages?
3) Maybe G is tolerating senseless and cheap keyword stuffing in page titles and descriptions, only with the keywords mixed up? (see my example in #6 result).
(Excuse my English; not my native tongue).
Here’s a little summary of our experiences/thoughts so far. I think one of the difficulties in these situations is lots of people have different variations on what happened. Some are suffering from this, others maybe from something else. I have always wondered if that’s by design, it seems so challenging to really pin down concrete, common traits.
Anyhow, this is beginning to prove very challenging; each day that goes by indicates it’s a fundamental shift, and its here to stay. I’m seeing sites we do not own, suffering from this that I never thought would incur a penalty, and then I’m seeing sites I always considered to be living on the edge with no effect all.
*-Its got to be a penalty; years on the first page, then in an instant position # 998.
*-It’s targeting well searched key words (phrases); ones you must have optimized for, at some point, in some way.
*-It’s targeting terms you traditionally have ranked well for. (probably from optimizing)
*-Its hitting the site, it seems to drag down the entire site, not all of it, all the way to the 900’s for sure, but overall rankings for interior pages are not doing as well.
*-Get hit, and you can go all the way to the end, right up to position 1,000, but not over it.
*-For us, it happened to a handful of sites, all at the same time, exactly on the night of January 1st.
These sites have been optimized with some basic old school SEO; Key word in the title, key word in the H1, variations of the key word in some on page text links, LSI variations in some text links, one or two links pointing out to clear authoritative sites. LOW keyword density, we were never big on repetition.
I have no proof whatsoever, and the thought of guessing really goes against our grain but what else could it be?
Linking? We don’t do much at all in the way of reciprocal linking. We don’t purchase links. A few of the sites don’t even have a links page.
Server? Possible, they are on the same server, it’s dedicated, we don’t share with others, its managed, its expensive tell you that. They do have separate IP’s.
Content? It’s completely original, but because these sites have been around so long they have been scraped to death, so there is a ton of duplication out there.
Whats left; On page optimization.
scraped to death
seeing this become a repeated theme....
1) Maybe G is filtering exact matches?
IE: No, I dont think, because my competitors are using
Page name:keyword1_keyword2_keyword3.html
Title: keyword1 keyword2 keyword3
Meta Description: keyword1 keyword2 keyword3
H1: keyword1 keyword2 keyword3
Keyword density: 1.13%
They are #1
Another one
Page name:keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html
Title: keyword1 keyword2 keyword3
Meta Description: keyword1 keyword2 keyword3
H1: keyword1 keyword2 keyword3
They are #2
Keyword density: 4.30%
My site before the collapse
Page name:keyword1-keyword2-keyword3.html
Title: keyword1 keyword2 keyword3
Meta Description: keyword1 keyword2 keyword3
H1: keyword1 keyword2 keyword3
Keyword density: 1.20%
I was #3, now: Who know.....
Best,
Jakomo
side bar, bottom of page, etc. lots of internal links
with anchor text.
anyone else?
The page that's #1 for one of my search terms is also a huge page, 150K+! I always thought Google didn't like large page sizes. I've reduced my keywords a bit on a couple of pages that were hit, so we'll see if that makes any difference.
if you dont think scraped content is a problem try searching for your own snippets..is it your page that shows?
The thing that we've noticed is that during the penalty period, a search for a snippet from our site shows scraper sites first, with ours last or near the bottom of the list.
The critical thing is that sometimes just one sentence may have been copied from a page that has hundreds or thousands of original sentences. Just that tiny fragment causes the penalty.
Also, in a search for a snippet our page is listed either first or last. It's as if G decides that if we are not the source of the content then we must be the worst offender possible - the PR0 and scraper sites all get listed ahead of us. It's like G decides to hit the quality sites hardest. Hard to understand what kind of twisted logic could cause this.
Weirder still - removing the copied snippet from our page has no effect. G "remembers" that your page was penalised and keeps the penalty even though there is no longer any duplicate content.
Our site has well written content that is very "copiable" by other sites. I can't help thinking that if we wrote rubbish content with spelling mistakes, etc, our competitors wouldn't bother copying it and we would stay ranked at number one.
shows scraper sites first, with ours last or near the bottom of the list
Sounds familiar but I'm not sure what comes first like the chicken or the egg question.
It could be that the penalty is severe enough it just puts us below the scraper sites and not that Google is viewing the scrapers as the original copy.
I am almost certain that content pages including ones that are old and well established are getting caught in an algo change that is meant to get rid of spam sites. Google keeps saying it has to be done algorithmically and this is the result.
So in that sense you can say this is the fault of the spammers. If they weren't around Google wouldn't even be doing this.
>>sandyeggo
Without any research and without looking at your website I could garauntee that a dramatic drop ranking can only be attributed to over optimization. Either on page optimization or off page (linking)... I mean seriously people what would it be? Do multiple pages from a site drop from doing it the right way?
>>jakomo
Please dude, forget about that keyword density crap. Even the numbers in your post prove that it does not matter. I have pages with far less of a KW density than anything you detailed that hold number one rankings.
Lets just take a look at the famous George Bush (and now Michael Moore) Google Bomb. If you dont know...do a search for Failure in Google and then view the cache to find out the Keyword Density for those pages is a big fat 0.
Ok so now that we have determined that keyword density CAN (and usually does) mean absolutely nothing...What keeps those pages at the top?
Organic Linking!....If you dont know, ask somebody!
My guess is that any penalty seen is a combination of poor linking and poor content...maybe one more than the other.
Anyway...Im done ranting!
Spend your Google 950 Error Research time building a high quality site with unique content and high quality links and you will much better off.
Peace Out,
-AndAgain
[edited by: AndAgain at 11:33 pm (utc) on Jan. 23, 2007]
Sandyeggo & Northweb:
Are you saying that if I have a navigation bar that lists all of the pages (lets say same level pages for a particular area) - of course they appear on all pages -- but if it is the search term, then it is what may be causing the overoptimization.
Thats my theory. Once in a while in my research i prove it wrong, but most of the time i'm right. I believe (for me) it is anchor text over optimization. It is the most common change to my affected pages. Put it this way, if I can look at a page and tell that someone really spent some time SEO'ing the page as far as internal linking and anchor text goes, it is usually hit in this update. On my site, the pages that i spend the LEAST amount of time on, hardly SEO'd at all - they are still in good position.
All I am doing to compare is to see who else tanked with me at the end of the 950-1000 results page. Look for the common element. Does anyone else see anything consistant in other tanked pages?
My guess is that any penalty seen is a combination of poor linking and poor content...maybe one more than the other.
I have plenty of organic links. If you think that not having enough links will take you from a page rank of 1-5 and put you at 991 in one single day, let me say that in my opinion you are mistaken. I held those positions for 5 to 7 years. I think I must have a few links out there :-)
Further, my competition has many of the same links so i have eliminated that problem for us as far as this problem goes.
[edited by: sandyeggo at 11:47 pm (utc) on Jan. 23, 2007]
It certainly does no harm to better optimize a page inappropriately hit by this mysterious penalty, but it's no solution in terms of the penalty, other than changing anything always makes the search engine kick the dust off and recalculate a page's score.
Navigation: most pages in the root, left nav links to priority ones, footer links to more.
Sections, every page in each section links to every page in its section so:
/section
all pages in /section link to all pages in /section, and include the left nav and footer of all root pages.
First of all has anyone noticed that not many senior members have posted here AND that this is not really even that big of a post...meaning not many people were hit?
Second of all...just because you held a position for x amount of years and probably have allot of very high quality links. Are you seriously saying that you did nothing wrong?...I mean can only be either your on page or off page optimization..what the heck else is there?
You did something wrong and just because you have some high quality links doesnt mean that some bad ones cannot hurt you.
You still didnt answer the question about the george bush google bomb that has stood strong without having the word "failure" on the page....I think everyone should really take a deep breath and think about that one for a while.
Bottomline is that I really highly doubt many people here have anything close to what can be called a search engine or even web crawling technology so I mean why try and pick apart an algorithm when you cant truely unless you have a the resources to TRUELY do so.
So really yeah my point, again, is...yeah if you have scraped sites getting hit..GOOD, I am so filled with joy that Google smacked your bottoms.
Peace
PS. I mean something done wasnt right or you wouldnt have gotten hit right? You cant possibly deny that nothing was done wrong sitting there with your eyebrows raised and forehead wrinkled up like...what!? I didnt do anything...kids stuff
[edited by: AndAgain at 12:11 am (utc) on Jan. 24, 2007]
Anyway, I am testing changes and will report if any movement at all.
Webmasters have to take responsibility for their content and protect it. Instead of spending the time typing on webmaster world about it, write up the dmca complaint.
If its a proxy site, find the ip and deny it...
Here's what I keep coming back to: Why would the "widget" search get such a serious and heavy-duty penalty, but not "widgets"? And by what mechanism could that happen?
How are the singular and plural used in phrases, and what are the possible commom phrases that would use one one other? How are the concepts that relate to the two different?
--widget repair
--how to fix a broken widget, could be
--how to fix broken widgets - as compared to
--buy widgets online
--widget shopping
--discount widgets
Two different concepts, but even though there can be an overlap between singular and plural usage of the words, the words that accompany the word in phrases draw upon different concepts - and would be approached differently.
>>And by what mechanism could that happen?
Does query time filtering by using a "pre-processed" list make any sense at all?
i'm changing the amount of anchor text and navigation on a penalized site. going through the kw density, etc....then just wait.
But the talk about scraped content really got us poking around and we were amazed at how much of it were suffering from. It just seems like a challenging task to go chasing every pathetic nitwit that steals content but maybe that’s the new reality.
We are seeing, over the course of the last three weeks real changes in the results were involved in. Mom and pop sites rising up very high, some of them with scraped content, (from us no less) but not all.
You get the feeling, if you step back and actually spend a little time studying this thing and know what your doing, that’s it’s a complex layering of different causes and effects.
pages with the exact same optimization/structure rank fine
I have the same situation. I am sure it is a very fine line that makes a few pages plunge while most still do well. I am with some others here in suspecting it is some sort of related phrase penalty. Phrases that were innocent natural phrases until now but because they match the patterns of spammers sites we are affected.
I mean can only be either your on page or off page optimization..what the heck else is there?
In this situation all we can do is try to work out what we need to do to bring our pages out of the penalty. In my case I may have to write articles that make less sense and build navigation that won't be as user friendly. I know there is no way we can out guess the Google's algo but we can find commonalities and try some small changes in our sites.
Also Google may adjust the line where they consider a page spam in order to bring more of the regular sites affected back up. They have done that before as well.
